The Annals of Iowa

202 Pages·2007·14.35 MB·English

by  Shaner Magalhaes

The Annals of
Iowa
Volume 65, Numbers 2 & 3
Spring/Summer 2006

SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE: MORMON HANDCART TREK
A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF HISTORY
In This Issue
FIVE HISTORIANS of the Mormon experience treat the details of the
Mormon handcart trek of 1856–1857. William G. Hartley provides an
overview of the experience, setting it in the context of the overall over-
land trail migration from the 1840s to the late 1860s. Don H. Smith
discusses the leadership, planning, and management of the 1856 hand-
cart migration. He argues that those aspects of the plan were executed
with care and skill and that the disasters that befell the last two compa-
nies of 1856 were due to factors beyond the leaders’ control. Fred E.
Woods, often using the voices of the emigrants themselves, narrates the
experiences of those emigrants as they made their way by ship from
Liverpool to the United States and then by rail to Iowa City. Lyndia
Carter picks up the story from there, following three of the handcart
companies—the Willie, Haven and Martin companies—across Iowa as
they were tested to see if they were up to the challenge of crossing the
Plains all the way to the Salt Lake Valley. Finally, Steven F. Faux care-
fully maps the route the handcart migrants followed across Iowa.

Front Cover
In the early 1900s the Daughters of Utah Handcart Pioneers commis-
sioned a statue to memorialize the handcart trek. Sculpted by Torleif
Knaphus, the 3-foot-high bronze monument, unveiled in 1926, was
displayed for years in Salt Lake City’s Temple Square Information
Bureau. Then, for the Mormon Pioneer Sesquicentennial in 1947, LDS
church leaders commissioned Knaphus to create a heroic-size copy.
Cast in bronze in New York, it has been displayed prominently ever
since near the Tabernacle in Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The well-
known and widely replicated image has come to symbolize for many the
heroism of the handcart emigrants whose experience is commemorated
in this special issue of the Annals of Iowa.

Editorial Consultants
Rebecca Conard, Middle Tennessee State R. David Edmunds, University of Texas
University at Dallas
Kathleen Neils Conzen, University of H. Roger Grant, Clemson University
Chicago William C. Pratt, University of Nebraska
William Cronon, University of Wisconsin– at Omaha
Madison Glenda Riley, Ball State University
Robert R. Dykstra, State University of Malcolm J. Rohrbough, University of Iowa

New York at Albany Dorothy Schwieder, Iowa State University
The Annals of
Iowa
Third Series, Vol. 65, Nos. 2, 3
Spring/Summer 2006
Marvin Bergman, editor

Contents

101 The Place of Mormon Handcart Companies
in America’s Westward Migration Story
William G. Hartley

124 Leadership, Planning, and Management
of the 1856 Mormon Handcart Emigration
Don H. Smith

162 Iowa City Bound: Mormon Migration
by Sail and Rail, 1856–1857
Fred E. Woods

190 Handcarts across Iowa: Trial Runs for the
Willie, Haven, and Martin Handcart Companies
Lyndia McDowell Carter

226 Faint Footsteps of 1856–1857 Retraced:
The Location of the Iowa Mormon Handcart Route
Steven F. Faux

A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF HISTORY FOUNDED IN 1863
Copyright 2006 by the State Historical Society of Iowa
ISSN 0003-4827
Book Reviews and Notices
252 IAN TYRRELL, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970,
by Rebecca Conard
254 JOHN W. REPS, John Caspar Wild: Painter and Printmaker of Nineteenth-Century
Urban America, by Charles K. Piehl
256 JOAN L. SEVERA, My Likeness Taken: Daguerreian Portraits in America, 1840–1860,
by Shirley Teresa Wajda
257 MARK A. LAUSE, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community,
by Nellie W. Kremenak
259 J. BLAINE HUDSON, Encyclopedia of the Underground Railroad
JAMES PATRICK MORGANS, John Todd and the Underground Railroad:
Biography of an Iowa Abolitionist
by Galin Berrier
262 MICHAEL L. TATE, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails,
by John P. Bowes
264 JONI L. KINSEY, Thomas Moran’s West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular
Taste, by Carol Clark
265 Edward Watts, An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern
Culture, by Zachary Michael Jack
267 JOHANNES B. WIST, The Rise of Jonas Olsen: A Norwegian Immigrant’s Saga,
by J. R. Christianson
268 THOMAS A. KRAINZ, Delivering Aid: Implementing Progressive Era Welfare in the
American West, by Joan Gittens
270 CARL R. WEINBERG, Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners
and World War I, by Bill R. Douglas
272 D. W. MEINIG, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of
History, vol. 4, Global America, 1915–2000, by David Blanke
274 JAMES K. CONANT, Wisconsin Politics and Government: America’s Laboratory of
Democracy, by John D. Buenker

276 New on the Shelves
Editor’s Perspective
IN JUNE 2006, several hundred people gathered in Iowa City
and Coralville to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the
Mormon Handcart Treks of 1856 and 1857. In those two years
seven handcart companies outfitted and left from a camp out-
side Iowa City in an area now part of Coralville. Some 200–300
of those who participated in the commemorative events spent a
day listening to scholarly papers treating the events in some
detail. Five of the papers from that symposium are gathered in
this special issue of the Annals of Iowa.
In the articles that follow, William G. Hartley provides an
overview of the experience, setting it in the context of the over-
all overland trail migration from the 1840s to the late 1860s. Don
H. Smith discusses the leadership, planning, and management
of the 1856 handcart migration. He argues that those aspects of
the plan were executed with care and skill and that the disasters
that befell the last two companies of 1856 were due to factors
beyond the leaders’ control. Fred E. Woods, often using the
voices of the emigrants themselves, narrates the experiences of
those emigrants as they made their way by ship from Liverpool
to the United States and then by rail to Iowa City. Lyndia Carter
picks up the story from there, following three of the handcart
companies—the Willie, Haven and Martin companies—across
Iowa as they were tested to see if they were up to the challenge
of crossing the Plains all the way to the Salt Lake Valley. Finally,
Steven F. Faux carefully maps the route the handcart migrants
followed across Iowa.
Editing this issue has been a rewarding experience, but, as
with most issues, it has presented special challenges. A set of
words used repeatedly throughout the articles requires clarifi-
cation. I am grateful to author Fred Woods for a clear statement
of usage of the terms migrants, emigrants, and immigrants and
their derivatives. With his permission, I have borrowed freely
from his statement to try to clarify the distinctions among those
terms.
According to Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, “Emi-
grate and immigrate make a case in which English has two words
where it could easily have made do with only one. The two
words have the same essential meaning—to ‘leave one country
to live in another’—and differ only in emphasis or point of
view: emigrate stressing leaving, and immigrate stressing enter-
ing.” To further complicate matters, emigrate is used once the
immigrant has arrived in the new country and begins to move to
the West. In the case of Mormon immigration, sometimes for-
eign immigrants were joined by Mormons who gathered from
America’s East Coast or merged with other LDS companies at
frontier outfitting posts. Such Mormons would properly be
termed emigrants. In this issue, the authors use immigrate/im-
migration/immigrant and emigrate/emigration/emigrant to
reflect the situation in which they are used. In addition, the
more generic terms migration or migrant are sometimes used for
variety.
Whether the subjects are known as migrants, emigrants, or
immigrants, the authors’ attention to the details of their experi-
ences enhances our understanding and appreciation of the pio-
neering adventure. In the 1970s the University of Iowa and The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) partnered to
preserve the campsite outside Iowa City and to restore adjoining
prairie. Their joint effort recognized that the handcart trek was a
significant part of the heritage not only of the church but of Iowa
and the nation as well. In opening remarks at the sesquicenten-
nial symposium, Willard L. “Sandy” Boyd, who was president
of the University of Iowa when the campsite preservation effort
was launched, reflected, “At this campsite the cross-continental
railroad once ended. Here the dense, tall, prairie grasses greeted
the [Mormon] converts. . . . At this place those believers built
the handcarts they pulled and pushed over more than 1,000
miles of prairies, mountains, and streams to create a new state.
That arduous trek exceeds our modern comprehension. The
physical and spiritual strength of those Mormon converts ex-
emplifies the commitment and faith that builds civilization.”

—Marvin Bergman, editor
The Place
of Mormon Handcart Companies in
America’s Westward Migration Story
WILLIAM G. HARTLEY
DURING THE SUMMER AND FALL OF 1856, personnel at
Fort Laramie witnessed a strange phenomenon: five separate
companies of men, women, and children pulling and pushing
simple two-wheeled carts westward. One year later, two more
dusty handcart brigades passed by, another one in 1859, and a
final two in 1860. In the history of overland trails migration to
the American West, handcarts are an anomaly. Of about 350,000
trail emigrants to Oregon and California and 70,000 to Utah,
nearly all traveled in wagon companies. In total, only about
3,000 pioneers went west in ten handcart companies during a
five-year period, 1856–1860.1
Among the first five brigades in 1856 were the ill-fated Willie
and Martin companies, whose terrible sufferings in blizzards
in present-day Wyoming have bestowed on handcart pioneers
more public awareness than their small numbers justify and
have made handcarts the symbol of all Mormon Trail travel
even though handcart emigrants constituted less than 5 percent

1. The standard, albeit dated, handcart study is LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W.
Hafen, Handcarts to Zion: The Story of a Unique Western Migration, 1856–1860
(Glendale, CA, 1960). An excellent article-length overview is Lyndia McDowell
Carter, “The Mormon Handcart Companies,” Overland Journal 13 (1995), 2–18.
Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (Lincoln,
NE, 1964), devotes chaps. 8 and 9 to the handcart saga.
THE ANNALS OF IOWA 65 (Spring/Summer 2006). © The State Historical
Society of Iowa, 2006.

101
102 THE ANNALS OF IOWA
of all Mormon emigrants. The image of someone walking near a
covered wagon is not nearly as suggestive as someone pushing
a loaded handcart of the endurance, self-sacrifice, and bravery
possessed by people who made the long trek west.
To be properly viewed, the Mormon handcart saga needs
not only the close-up lens typically used in studies to date but
also the wide-angle lens that places it in the contexts of over-
land trail travel in general and of 23 years of Mormon trail traf-
fic. The discussion that follows provides an overview of all ten
handcart companies positioned within those larger contexts.

WAGON TRAVEL to Oregon began in 1841 and to California
in 1844. The Oregon and California trails started from Indepen-
dence and Westport (now Kansas City), Missouri, and initially
passed by Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger in Wyoming Territory,
and then swung northerly to Fort Hall in Idaho. That common
route, designated the Oregon and California Trail, split near
Fort Hall, the right fork heading to Oregon and the left into Ne-
vada and California. After what is termed the “Great Migration”
to Oregon in 1843, wagon travel to Oregon became an annual
event. One year later, in 1844, the Stephens-Murphy party be-
came the first company of wagons to roll to California. Wagon
travel to California in significant numbers began in 1846, the
year 49 of the 89 members of the ill-fated Donner party perished
in Sierra snows. After John Sutter’s workmen discovered gold
in 1848, argonauts swarmed to California during the next four
years. The two peak years for emigrants going to California and
Oregon were 1850 and 1852. After 1852, the flow decreased year
by year until completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869
made overland trail travel all but obsolete.2

2. Two excellent studies of the western trails are John D. Unruh Jr., The Plains
Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1860 (Ur-
bana and Chicago, 1979); and George R. Stewart, The California Trail: An Epic
with Many Heroes (Lincoln, NE, 1962). Also useful are David Lavender, West-
ward Vision: The Story of the Oregon Trail (New York, 1963), and John Mack
Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, CT, 1979). During
the Gold Rush and in subsequent years, many on the California Trail took a
Salt Lake cutoff near Fort Bridger, which rejoined the main trail midway
across Nevada.
Mormon Handcart Companies and Westward Migration 103
Mormon emigration to the Great Salt Lake Valley began in
1847. Over the next 22 years approximately 70,000 Mormons
headed west in at least 329 wagon companies, using about
10,000 wagons total, and in ten handcart brigades. Mormon
numbers crossing the Plains averaged nearly 3,000 per year.3
Unlike most other trail travelers, those Mormon emigrants “did
not go west for a new identity, missionary work, adventure,
furs, land, health, or gold, but were driven beyond the frontier
for their religious beliefs.” They were followed by “thousands
of European converts, at first mainly English, later with a heavy
Scandinavian infusion.” Handcart pioneers amounted to less
than 5 percent of all Mormon emigration and less than 1 percent
of America’s overland emigration to the West.4
The trail experience for Mormon emigrants was much like
what their contemporaries bound for Oregon and California
experienced. “Their daily routine, their food, wagons, animals,
sicknesses, dangers, difficulties, domestic affairs, trail constitu-
tions, discipline, the blurring of sexual distinctions relative to
work, and so forth, were typical.”5 However, Mormon emi-
grants differed from most westering Americans in several im-
portant ways. They migrated because of religious beliefs that
required them to move to develop a religious haven. Generally
they were much poorer than the average westward migrants.
By and large Mormons traveled as families and in church-
organized companies led by captains appointed by church au-
thorities. Mormon emigration “was organized and directed by
conscious policy.”6 Compared to other Plains travelers, the
Mormons, according to Wallace Stegner, “were the most sys-

3. For a list of annual totals, see Stanley B. Kimball, Historic Resource Study:
Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail (Washington, DC, 1991), 134–35. Kimball
cites now dated statistics from Andrew Jenson showing that 68,028 people
went west on the Mormon Trail. But my study of 1853 Mormon wagon trains
shows more than 3,000 Mormon emigrants, compared to Jenson’s 2,603. And
for 1861 Jenson listed only 1,959, whereas my study of that year’s emigration
shows 2,000 more than that. Hence, the larger 70,000 figure used above. Fur-
ther studies of individual years probably will increase that total.
4. Kimball, Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail, 9; Stegner, The Gathering of
Zion, 197.
5. Kimball, Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail, 2–3.
6. William Mulder, Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia
(1957; reprint, Minneapolis, 2000), vii.
104 THE ANNALS OF IOWA
tematic, organized, disciplined, and successful pioneers in our
history.” He also noted that “Oregon emigrants and argonauts
bound for the gold fields lost all their social cohesion en route,”
but for Mormons, “far from loosening their social organization,
the trail perfected it.” Positioning the Mormon migration within
western history, he found that, “in the composition of its wagon
trains, the motives that drove them, the organization and disci-
pline of the companies, it differed profoundly from the Oregon
and California migrations. These were not groups of young and
reckless adventurers, nor were they isolated families or groups
of families. They were literally villages on the march, villages of
a sobriety, solidarity, and discipline unheard of anywhere else
on the western trails.”7
By 1856, when the first Mormon handcart companies pulled
in to Utah Territory, the Oregon-California Trail, including the
Salt Lake Cutoff, had been “more heavily traveled, more firmly
beaten down, and more improved by planned work—was ceas-
ing to be a trail and becoming what we may better term a road.”8
Therefore, after handcart pullers followed existing state roads
across Iowa, they trekked the next 1,000 miles along well-used
roads to the Great Salt Lake Valley.

MORMON is a nickname that outsiders had given to members
of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who, by 1856,
called themselves “Latter-day Saints” (later abbreviated as LDS).
During the nineteenth century, LDS converts were expected to
uproot and move to church gathering places, first in Ohio, then
in Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa, and finally in Utah. “Wherefore
the decree hath gone forth from the Father,” a Mormon scripture
reads, “that they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the
face of this land.”9 Gathering centers were created to be places
of refuge from persecution. For converts, “emigration was prac-
tically synonymous with conversion.” Saints in England were

7. Stegner, The Gathering of Zion, 1, 9.
8. Stewart, The California Trail, 296.
9. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Doctrine and Covenants, 29:
7–8. The Doctrine and Covenants is a collection of revelations recorded by
Mormonism’s founding prophet, Joseph Smith Jr., and his successors.